The Sun Will Come Out
by MySynonym
Summary: Michelangelo experienced an adventure as a child which both changed his life and kept him the same. It was an adventure of a turtle, a girl, and an earthbound spirit. Rated for language and sensitive material
1. Prologue

I have had this idea for a while and been working on it. Hope you all enjoy it.

The Sun Will Come Out  
Prologue

When I was murdered it was not as I had always expected it to be.

I had always seen myself sprawled out on the kitchen floor in a stream of my own blood, the damn dog licking my cheek, my little girl in the corner waiting for the bad things to go away, and my spirit running, screaming its way, all the way to Heaven or Hell, whatever comes first. My husband would be finishing his dinner at the table less than five feet away.

Then again, I suppose this was because I had never expected anything extraordinary in my life and, likewise, did not expect much in death.

When the handsome young man from the second floor offered to help me with the groceries, I thought I had at last made a friend. I believed that there was someone close to home that I could send Lizzie to when Frank would become too drunk.

I thought for sure he was gay.

Once more, though, I proved to be a terrible judge of character as he brought me to my door, helped me in, and closed the door behind us. It would be the last time I would be entering my home and the picture of my loving daughter on the television would be the last thing I ever saw as my head was rammed through it.

Soon after, the only thing about my death suspicions that turned out to be correct was that my soul leaped from that house faster than I could think. I believe I was out of there before my final pulse.

I ran and ran through walls and stories until the numbness set in and I realized that I was nowhere.

My murder would remain unsolved and my daughter would take my place as both the object of my husband's undying adoration and scorning hatred. My murderer remained on the second floor with not a single finger pointed at him for my untimely death, and I was stuck in a three block radius yet again.

There was nothing to do, as before, but watch my family fall apart but remain together, like the fallen pieces of puzzle caught in a transparent bowl and clustered together but not as a whole.

Here I remained in Limbo for months, watching and waiting as my little girl looked out her bedroom window and stared into an abysmal plane of a city where her vision was only met by white walls. And, within me, some more of myself would die with her slowly. Ever so slowly.

I found in time that my spirit lingered in hopes for a release, for a realization, for a completion of some sort. There was so much I had left unfinished.

My unsolved murder, my daughter's unhappiness, the entrapment, it all became the chains that bound me to the living world.

At last, though, I learned that my chains could indeed reach further away from my apartment. Weakened but oddly adventurous while Lizzie made her way to school too far away for me to follow, I ventured to where my soul felt warmth.

This warmth was down below the streets and here I met a family which, despite all circumstance and all reason, was functional in the world of Hell's Kitchen.

The four children played in the filth of the sewers while a single parent watched idly by, alert to danger but secure in safety. They were youthful and enthusiastic. They were beyond all reality I had known in life and yet I felt something from them I had never felt before.

I felt Hope.

I saw Chance.

Soon my time without Lizzie became my time with the family which lived in the already shady and filled shadows of Hell's Kitchen. Their innocence and childlike mirrored the loss and maturity my daughter had experienced.

This was never truer in any of the green skinned boys than in the one called Michelangelo.

I knew that there would be something to save my earthbound spirit and the entrapped life of my daughter the very day that, as my withered soul followed the green children, Michelangelo stopped in midstride, turned around, and stared at me.

Not through me. At me.

He grinned and waved before carrying on.


	2. Chapter One

The Sun Will Come Out  
Chapter One

I suppose that the best excuse for my inabilities would be in my conditioning. Over the years of verbal, physical, and emotional abuse I had been conditioned to be a hollow shell. I was no more a person than I was an exotic pet or a star on the Broadway stage. I felt inhuman.

Inadequacy and undeserving, I could not better myself without pleasing others. I could not please others because I was inhuman.

For as long as I could remember, these emotions ran high in my life. I could not be better than I already was. I could not escape the terrible circumstances of my life for the very reasons that it was terrible. I was undeniably trapped. Enclosed in this box on the lonesome street of Hell's Kitchen, I was doomed to suffocate.

That was before Elizabeth was brought into my life. I loved that little girl more than life itself.

With her birth, her escape into life, I felt as though I had a chance, through her, to live again. To escape.

My reason to live was to ensure that she would never suffer the life I had suffered.

In my death, I had failed.

* * *

Another effect from my conditioning was that I had always accepted that I would be overlooked and ignored. When I became trapped within that Limbo, I had no bigger expectations either. What most spirits had the most difficulty with, being ignored and seen through by those they dearly loved, was simply another Friday night for me.

I watched from within a glass box, as I always had, and never anticipated a better outlook.

This went double for when I rested within the same glass walls beneath the streets. I had no emotional attachment or distinct memories of the family which resided there. I did not even know of their existence until I was long dead. Therefore, I never believed I would be found or seen.

Not until Michelangelo looked at me.

It broke my heart slightly as I felt the warmth of someone acknowledging my presence. The small, mutated child broke the barrier I had all but been accustomed to over the years. It was beautiful and glowing. It reminded me of the love I once shared with my little girl, the little girl I no longer could protect.

My heart laid shattered as he walked away at the beck and call of his brothers. He was clueless as to the importance of his look toward me. He would never know the bond that we then inexplicably shared over the smallest of small encounters. I would not forget, however, and I would not forget him.

Instead, I was quite set on following him and his brothers, toddling along expertly through the sludge of the sanitation system.

I wondered so much about them, more so than I ever had before.

Once they had been akin to a television program I could watch and enjoy from a distance. Now I was sucked into their world, wanting to live through them in the way I had once lived so candidly through Lizzie.

When their trail led them to a door and, behind that door, a series of small rooms I realized that they were not foundlings living on the scum of the earth but children, whose gray furred father waited upon them. He keenly welcomed them, embracing them in the way I missed embracing Lizzie.

Last but not least in the line of hugs and greetings was Michelangelo.

As the others scattered toward the leftovers their father had scavenged in their absence, the young Michel curled into his rat-father's arms and looked up to him.

"What is this, Michelangelo?" the rat questioned with an adoring laugh.

"I think I made a friend today," he whispered.

I smiled knowingly, watching through the cracks of my little glass box.

I thought I had, too.

* * *

Lizzie, taught through experience, ignored her father's slurs as she entered the house. She did not look around for me, she had stopped doing so nearly a week beforehand. She knew better. She had always been a smart girl.

Into her room she went. There she closed the door.

She would sit in her room, doing the coloring sheets and addition tables that her school teachers had given her. There she was sheltered from the world, within her square room.

From time to time, she would glance out toward the beams of light that sparingly broke through the glass window of her room. There she would wonder what life _could _have been like outside of her square room.

The thoughts would end there and she would continue working, attempting to please the instructors she relied upon so much.

Just like her mother.

* * *

_MySynonym: A special thank you to the supportive reviews last chapter. It meant so very much to me! I've never done anything like this and it meant a lot to get that support. Thank you!_


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